And we all know who the commission members will be: a group of "bipartisan" former congressmen, senators, and executive officials (is Alan Simpson or Tom Kean Sr. available?) who will recommend gimmicks and tax increases.
And of course it mandates an up or down vote on the recommendations.
Here's an idea! Instead, how about the CURRENT legislators (congressmen and senators, who we pay to do these things), form a COMMITTEE to "tackle" the national debt.
Oh, no! We can't do that! That takes serious thought and effort, and we don't have the time - we only work 12-2 two days a week and have reelection fundraisers to attend.
So we'll just delegate to a bunch of people who AREN'T accountable - pass the buck and pretend we did something.
Oh, and it only took him five years to come up with this old idea.
Anyone else here remember the Reagan era, Grace Commission? Reagan set up this commission, to study federal spending, and develop plans to root out waste and fraud, so that federal spending would be reduced.
I don’t recall if any lasting effects ever came out of the Grace Commission.
It’s all well and good, to study a problem. But then if there is no political will to follow through on making tough decisions to deal with a problem, the problem never gets solved.
The annual cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the Department of Defense, and federal debt interest payments, was about $4.2 trillion in Fiscal 2023.
Total federal receipts in Fiscal 2023 were just $4.4 trillion.
In other words, our four most expensive programs are almost in deficit, BEFORE we pay for anything else!
This is not going to end well.
1. The solutions should not be so-called “bipartisan”. They should come from outside the Congress, outside the federal government, by indepenent financial/economic analysts.
3. The goal should not be to “stabilize” the federal debt but to reduce it, drastically.
4. Reducing the debt should include selling federal assets, particularly federal lands (reducing the lands in the western states held by the federal government) and federal mineral rights on federal lands.
5. It should not require any “commision”, merely hearings that listen to the outside independent analysts tell the idiot “bipartisan” politicians what they ought to do (and the hearings should be public).
Setting up a lucrative consulting job on the committee when he is out of the government.
Romney refuses to do that. But Romney will sit in front of TV cameras and talk about the need for a commission to look at the problem sometime in the future.
They should have issued a “strongly worded memo”
It amazes me Mittens has enough brain power to get out of bed in the morning.
“ establishing a commission to find solutions to decrease the national debt that currently exceeds $33.6 trillion.”
A fake commission to provide excuses why overspending can’t be stopped